(A 2004 New York Times Notable Book of the Year) We all know Benjamin Franklin, or think we do, as the genial polymath, aphorist, and self-made man—the quintessential American. The problem with this image, according to Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Gordon Wood, is that it is simply not true. Here he gives us the real Franklin: his preoccupation with becoming a gentleman and his conversion to revolutionary; his arguments with John Adams and with Congress; his love of Europe and his conflicted sense of our national identity. While reminding us that Franklin's death was greeted by mass mourning in France and mass indifference here, Wood argues that Franklin did indeed become the Revolution's necessary man, and explains why his importance was so denigrated in his own lifetime, yet has been inflated ever since.